At home in the hills: Journalist Udayan Mukherjee recounts his journey in debut novel

While many of us talk about moving to the mountains, former TV journalist Udayan Mukherjee has actually done it. And they feature in his debut novel Dark Circles.

In a recent interview, former television journalist-turned-writer Udayan Mukherjee had described depression as a cancer of our times. “In our parents’ generation, cancer had exploded in a big way. It was a constant thing, and people were scared of having it at some point in their lives,” he says. “Today, mental illness is becoming what cancer was earlier. It is not addressed adequately, and people are still trying to diagnose and figure it out. We’re only now realising what the scale of the problem might have been in an earlier generation.”

Indeed, Mukherjee’s debut novel, Dark Circles, explores the idea of depression as a hereditary condition that can move from one generation to the next, infecting members of the same family in different ways — from unshakeable gloom to unbridled anger to suicide. “Aspects of the past inform our current lives, and it’s the same with mental illness,” says Mukherjee, 46. “The book looks at how the lives of our parents continue to step onto our own, even if they have passed on.” Mukherjee, however, deals with it with a light touch — never belabouring the causes, symptoms or treatment through his writing — yet allowing for enough passing mention of the artefacts of depression for the reader to be constantly aware of this dark and deeply painful backdrop.

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One challenge per debut is probably more than enough, which is why for the setting of Dark Circles, Mukherjee chooses something more familiar: The hills. “I didn’t want to challenge myself further by having to reimagine a completely new place,” says Mukherjee. “The hills are very familiar to me.” The western Himalayas, where Mukherjee currently lives, is the venue for several important incidents in the book: A childhood home, a boarding school, an ashram that one of the characters retreats to, a funeral and, finally, the scene of an all-important reveal. The stillness and calm of the mountains contrasts starkly with the deeply-disturbed state of mind of the protagonist who, until the end, struggles inconclusively with mental health issues.

While many of us talk about giving it all up and moving to the mountains, Mukherjee has actually done it. After working for two decades as a journalist, markets forecaster and managing editor at a television network, in 2013 Mukherjee decided to move to Kumaon, and build a house in Sitla, in Uttarakhand. “I have always been drawn to the mountains, though there was no childhood connection,” he says. “Initially, I was drawn to the sheer beauty of the Himalayas, but later I felt there were many other reasons for the attraction — the stillness it provides, the silence which allows you to think, the scope it offers to communicate with yourself. Also, you create a certain distance and a lot of the things which seem very important in our daily lives, begin to lose their relevance.”

In the five years since he stepped away from a fulltime job, Mukherjee has been busy. He is an entrepreneur now, running two successful businesses from his Himalayan abode, so to speak. The first is a ‘glamping’ venture in Munsiyari, located in a remote corner of Uttarakhand, and the other is in Ladakh. “My journeys took me to some beautiful parts,” Mukherjee says. “I also realised that many of these stunning locations did not have a proper place for visitors to stay at. So, one thing led to another and a glamping retreat was born. And then, on my travels to Ladakh I came across this absolutely sensational stretch by the river Indus, close to the Thiksay monastery. Again, a few conversations took place and another retreat came into being.”

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The resorts are run for profit, but Mukherjee says that he has no “ambition of making millions from these places”. He admits that he doesn’t see himself as a hotelier, but embarked on this journey mainly because it was so different from what he had done so far.

When he quit his day job in television, Mukherjee says he was not looking to “do” anything. “I am intrinsically opposed to the idea that people always have to be gainfully employed or productively engaged,” he says. “This is a kind of conditioning that we have been subjected to by the corporate world. And now, people are so defined by the jobs they do, that they cannot handle life without that identity. They cannot handle empty time. Everyone always has to be ‘doing’ something. This idea, to me, is preposterous. Yes, we all need to make a living, but do we need to glorify this work thing beyond its uses?”

Now he spends his days in an enviable idyll, with “long walks, hearty breakfasts, lingering chats over coffee, mornings spent writing, cooking lunch myself on most days” and generally, catching up on his reading, on news, on inputs about his resorts and prepping for the occasional TV appearance, among other things. He is also able to devote more time to collecting art. Mukherjee is said to have a formidable collection, though he plays this down. “I have an interest in art, and I do possess some nice art but I am hardly a big collector,” he says. “I am partial to the Bengal School, [to the works of] Rabindranath Tagore, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, Somnath Hore, Chittaprosad, Ganesh Pyne and Jamini Roy. I am deeply interested in Pakistani art; Rashid Rana, Imran Qureshi, Shahzia Sikander are some of my favourites. I am not, however, a big fan of market favourites like Raza (particularly the Bindu series), Husain or Souza.” Mukherjee is also involved in a textile venture (for weavers in Barabanki, UP and Srinagar, Kashmir) called Baragaon Weaves, as a partner, and insists that this, too, is “not a financially-driven move”.

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“And now, I am writing,” he says. “So, you could say that I have not only been sitting and staring at the peaks, but all this is driven by passion and interest. A full time professional career is over. I have done my time.” The mountain air must indeed be conducive to creativity because Mukherjee’s second book is almost complete. It’s going to be a crime novel, also set in the Himalayas. Wouldn’t it have been easier, after years spent in forecasting and financial journalism, to write something on the economy instead? “I spent nearly twenty years discussing the economy and markets. Writing about it would have been commercially lucrative but it would have been a case of milking my narrow area of perceived expertise yet again,” Mukherjee says. “Fiction is the last thing people expected of me. With the way the real world is today, I am surprised more people don’t take refuge in fiction.”

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